6

The Mind's Big
Bang

The emergence of art,
technology, and society about 50,000 years ago. Hominid evolution
and Neanderthals. Early human migrations. Language. Memes and how
they now counteract biological evolution.

A. Cave Paintings,
Stone Tools, and Fossil Skulls

An archaeologist crawling
through a cave in France is "searching for a special moment
in evolution," the narrator tells us, "an era cloaked
in mystery, when with hardly a change in appearance, humans began
behaving in ways they had never behaved before. He wants to find
out how it was our ancestors became truly human." Where once
there were just bare cave walls, suddenly there was art, technology,
communication and culture. "The question is, What happened
to make all this possible? How could it be, a species opened its
eyes and burst into a new realm? How was it, human ancestors evolved
a whole new way of seeing themselves? And because of this, in time
transformed the planet?"

We fly over a mist-shrouded
landscape. "The Great Rift Valley of East Africa," the
narrator continues, "here is where the human story began. For
millions of years, Africa was the landscape of human evolution.
Across this terrain, an ancestral people survived, reproduced, and
passed on who they were to succeeding generations. Without Africa,
humanity as we know it might never have become."

We stop at a spot in
the Great Rift Valley which was "once inhabited by hominids,
before they were truly human." Smithsonian Institution paleoanthropologist
Rick Potts clambers up a hillside looking for fossils and stone
tools. "Now it's a site scientists visit to understand how
people lived and what they thought about a million years ago."
Potts digs up a stone axe, and a computer animation shows us primitive
humans making such tools and using them to butcher a large animal.

"Here, across this
terrain," the narrator says, "these paleolithic or ancient
stone-tool people made one simple implement for nearly a million
years." According to Potts, the stone axe he found was the
Swiss Army knife of the paleolithic period. The people who made
them, he says, made the same thing over and over, but they probably
didn't speak to each other as we do. "They didn't have something
that we have--the creativity, the innovation, the diversity of cultures
that of course characterizes our own species."

Another computer animation
takes us on a long journey through time. "On the tree of life,"
the narrator tells us, "human evolution began around six million
years ago when hominids split off from the common ancestor they
shared with chimpanzees. They descended from the trees about four
million years ago and entered a new world. Two and a half million
years ago with a modified hand they fashioned stone tools and began
to depend more and more on a diet of meat." Thanks to the computer,
this all happens before our very eyes.

"The size of their
brains increased substantially," continues the narrator. "At
about two million years ago they began to leave Africa. These early
humans were successful for a while but in the end every one of them
would become extinct. It wasn't until fifty or sixty thousand years
ago that the first truly modern humans, our ancestors, left Africa."
Human actors take the place of computer-generated figures. "They
were hunter-gatherers, foraging for food living in small groups
roaming the wide landscape, but they were different from their predecessors.
They had begun to live a revolutionary new way of life."

A series of reconstructed
skulls appears on the screen, starting with one that is very ape-like
and ending with one from a modern human. "This lifestyle had
been achieved over millions of years," says the narrator, "through
the multiple processes of evolution--adaptation, competition, mutation,
selection, and failure, punctuated by the occasional success. Ours
was a routine story of evolution, of change over time, no different
from the stories of so many other species, but it produced behavior
new to the planet."

B. The Beginnings of
Art and Technology

"Behavior changed
very radically around fifty thousand years ago," we are told.
A fossil skull appears, but "this hundred-thousand-year-old
human did not behave like us." Fully modern human behavior,
we are told, included the making of a wide range of artifacts, such
as art and jewelry.

According to Massachusetts
Institute of Technology psychologist Steven Pinker: "In a sense,
we're all Africans." He explains that human babies from all
over the world have the same basic ability to learn languages, how
to count, and how to make and use tools. "It suggests,"
says Pinker, "that the distinctively human parts of our intelligence
were in place before our ancestors split off into the different
continents."

"After leaving Africa
some fifty or sixty thousand years ago," the narrator continues,
"this fully modern species headed east, into Asia, and even
to Australia. Others followed the coast of the Mediterranean north,
dispersing into the hills and leaving behind evidence that their
minds were unique to this planet." A small boat rounds a point
of land, and we are introduced to University of Arizona anthropologists
Mary C. Stiner and Steven L. Kuhn. Stiner and Kuhn are "excavating
a home that these early immigrants occupied," the Ucagizli
Cave in Turkey, "one of the earliest modern human living sites."
To their surprise they find an abundance of ornaments, including
beads dated at forty-three thousand years ago--making them "the
oldest beads found so far anywhere in the world."

Beads, however, are of
no practical use in a hunter-gatherer society. "They would
suggest," says the narrator, "that those who lived in
this formidable place had more on their minds than straightforward
survival. What could have been so important about these beads, and
what can they tell us about these early days of modern humans?"
By the time humans had migrated to what is now southern France,
we are told, they were mass-producing beads with a distinctive grinding
technique. "Beads are an artifact of the mind's big bang,"
the narrator says. "They are evidence of our creative and cultural
beginnings. They suggest a time when humans began relating their
own social groups to groups of other humans."

By wearing ornaments
such as beads, we are told, these ancient humans were "expressing
social relationships." And that was "very new in human
evolution." Some prehistoric jewelry is displayed. "Humans
using technology in the service of social identity," the narrator
says. "This was momentous." A shadowy figure pulls a burning
stick out of a fire. "This transformation of our minds began
in Africa, and it left a trail of evidence as far away as Australia.
But the clues are most abundant in Europe."

The scene shifts to a
green countryside. In Europe, the narrator tells us, "humans
encountered another species of hominid--a species almost identical
to us--but not quite." A drawing shows massive, hairy, almost-human
figures. "It's this `not quite' that tells us about our selective
advantage. We call these ancient Europeans Neanderthals."

Neanderthals were bigger
than we are, and they had receding chins and foreheads. Most notably,
Neanderthal burial sites were simple compared with ours, and these
creatures apparently did not use pictures or symbols. "In contrast,"
the narrator says, "modern humans seemed to be treating their
dead with extreme care."

A researcher compares
the heavy stone-tipped spears used by Neanderthals with the lighter
antler-tipped spears used by modern humans, and he concludes that
modern humans were smarter and more technologically advanced. He
says that Neanderthal culture was relatively unchanging, but modern
human culture changed rapidly after it first appeared about fifty
thousand years ago. This suggests that modern humans--unlike Neanderthals--were
able to improve on what went before, from one generation to the
next, and the narrator calls this ability "a strategic advantage."

"Improved technology
suggests much," says the narrator, "especially humans'
emerging ability to transmit information over great distances and
through the realms of time." We see more drawings of massive,
hairy figures, as we are told that Neanderthals lived in small,
isolated groups. "For modern humans," the narrator continues,
"portable art may have served as a means of communication--some
of it travelling many hundreds of miles from where it had been created."
Thus modern humans, unlike Neanderthals, were able to establish
a far-ranging culture.

So we are told that we
have evidence of modern humans--people, like us--starting about
fifty thousand years ago. But a few minutes ago we were told that
"for millions of years . . .an ancestral people survived, reproduced,
and passed on who they were." We were told that scientists
visit the East African rift valley to "understand how people
lived and what they thought about a million years ago." Clearly,
the "people" who lived a million or more years ago were
not people in the ordinary sense of the word. Among other things,
they didn't have language, technology or art. Apparently, not even
Neanderthals were people in the ordinary sense of the word. Why,
then, does Evolution call million-year-old animals "people"?

Since the evidence for
human evolution is so weak, Evolution simply expects us to take
the Darwinian account for granted. Instead of acknowledging that
we have no way of knowing whether these extinct creatures were related
to us--much less "what they thought"--Evolution calls
them "people" and tells us more just-so stories.

We find ourselves in
a cave, where an archaeologist shows us a "spit-painting"
technique that may have been used by ancient humans to produce the
cave art we find today. He speculates about why people made cave-paintings;
he also finds evidence that cave-dwellers may have made music. As
we leave the cave, the narrator says: "So below and above ground,
our ancestors were refining technology and art, and communicating
in complex ways. And it appears as if these changes occurred almost
overnight. How could it have happened?"

C. Brain Mutations
and Child Development

Reflections of primitive-looking
figures shimmer on some water, as a man flanked by fossil skulls
says: "My own view is that there was a brain change--that there
was a genetic change that promoted the fully modern human brain,
that allowed the kind of innovation and invention--the ability to
innovate and invent--that is a characteristic of modern humans.
If you accept the idea that there was a neurological change fifty
thousand years ago, and that this was rooted in biology, it would
just become the latest and most recent in a long series of mutations
on which natural selection operated to produce the human species
as we understand it today."

Steven Pinker returns
to tell us: "It's very likely that the changes in the brain
didn't happen overnight. There wasn't one magical mutation that
miraculously allowed us to speak and to walk upright and to cooperate
with one another and to figure out how the world works." Primitive-looking
figures walk down a stream-bed as Pinker continues: "Evolution
doesn't work that way. It would be staggeringly improbable for one
mutation to do all of that. Chances are, there were lots and lots
of mutations over a span of tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands
of years that fine-tuned and sculpted the brain to give it all the
magnificent powers that it has today."

But Pinker knows nothing
about "mutations" that could have "fine-tuned and
sculpted the brain." Nobody does. There is no evidence that
genetic mutations can do such a thing--not even over thousands of
years. In fact, scientists have only vague ideas of how genes affect
brain development, even in simple animals. And all known mutations
that affect development--such as the Antennapedia mutation described
in Episode Two--are harmful. As Cambridge University geneticist
David L. Stern wrote in 2000, "one of the oldest problems in
evolutionary biology"--the generation of relevant variations
by mutations--"remains largely unsolved." Pinker's statement
that mutations could have given the brain "all the magnificent
powers that it has today" is sheer speculation.See
. The Stern quotation is from David L. Stern, "Perspective:
Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Problem of Variation,"
Evolution 54 (2000), 1079.

We watch a cartoon animation
of the brain, and Pinker tells us that "a lot of our evolution
consisted not just in getting more of this stuff, but in wiring
it in precise ways to support intelligence." The narrator adds:
"So it may not have been the size of the human brain, but its
wiring, that endowed us with substantial new skills."

Chimpanzees scamper through
the trees in a Ugandan forest, as the narrator says that one of
those new skills might have been "the knack for living a complex
social life. Here in East Africa, chimpanzees show us how we might
have interacted with others before the
mind's big bang." Chimpanzees can induce other chimpanzees
to behave socially only through direct physical force. "But
after six million years of separate evolution," the narrator
says, "humans have acquired a significant advantage"--language.

We go to the University
of St. Andrews in Scotland, where psychologist Andrew Whiten studies
learning patterns in young children. According to the narrator,
Whiten found that through the age of three "a child cannot
ascribe actions, motives and beliefs to others. But by the age of
five, the child's brain has developed the capacity for stepping
into someone else's mind." Chimpanzees, however, never reach
this stage.

Actors portraying primitive
people stand over a blazing fire, as Whiten says: "In a society
of humans, being socially competent really counts. Being socially
competent allows you ultimately to out-compete others, to gain better
access to resources, the best mates. And in those kind of societies,
it seems the brain can be more important than brawn. So it's potentially
a very powerful evolutionary force, because it's driving a kind
of upward spiral. Social complexity begets greater social intelligence;
social intelligence presents even greater problems to the individuals
in the next generation; and they have to become more socially complex."

But the "evolution"
Whiten describes here is social progress--not evolution in the Darwinian
sense of new species originating from a common ancestor through
natural selection. And as interesting as his research in developmental
psychology may be, it tells us nothing about the
origin of our ability to "ascribe actions, motives and
beliefs" to others. Of course it is advantageous to understand
how others think. But how did that ability originate? Nothing that
has been presented here helps to answer that question.

D. Language

"Complex social
relationships," the narrator adds. "A theory of mind.
These are qualities we associate with modern humans. But how could
we practice any of them without language?" The camera focuses
on people's mouths as they speak. "With language we can relive
the past, ponder the future, teach our children, tell secrets, manipulate
crowds. But imagine a world without language."

We travel to Managua,
Nicaragua, where we meet "Mary No-Name"--a woman who has
been deaf since birth. Years ago, U.S. experts went to Managua to
teach standard sign-language to deaf children who had just been
brought in from isolated villages, but they failed. It turned out
that the children developed their own sign-language instead, without
any help from the experts. Apparently, the only stimulus they had
needed was to meet other deaf people with whom they wanted to communicate.

"Might this moment,"
the narrator asks, "resemble what happened around fifty thousand
years ago--the turning-point that led to the explosion of human
creativity?" A girl gestures expressively with her arms. "Language
does not need a voice," the narrator says, "it is our
legacy, an inevitability of being human. Today, we still don't know
exactly when language evolved--when it opened the door to our phenomenal
success as a species."

"While many species
can communicate, even vocalize," the narrator continues, "only
human languages are driven by complex rules." All human languages
have these rules, called syntax, which enable us to organize information
hierarchically, and to construct sentences.

According to Oxford University
zoologist Richard Dawkins, those of our ancestors most gifted with
the tools of language might have been those to prosper. We visit
Dawkins as he waters his garden. "We don't know when language
started," says Dawkins, "but as soon as language did start
it provided an environment in which those individuals who were genetically
best equipped to thrive and survive and succeed in an environment
dominated by language were the ones who left the most offspring.
And that probably--in our forefathers--that probably led to an improvement
in the ability to use language."

Once again we find ourselves
in the company of primitive-looking people, squatting next to a
blazing fire. "What, exactly, was the evolutionary purpose
of language?" the narrator asks. "Was it to discuss waterholes,
weapons, and what lay over the hill? Or might it have had another
advantage?"

In the passenger car
of a train somewhere in the United Kingdom, University of Liverpool
evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar is eavesdropping on other people's
conversations. "The kind of situations we're looking for to
study language," he says, "[were] just the sort of natural
spaces where you would have a conversation--a very informal, relaxed
conversation--with friends." According to Dunbar, the standard
view of people who study language is that its primary function is
"the transmission of technically complex information. This
is what I kind of call the Einstein and Shakespeare version of language."
Dunbar finds, however, that "what people talk about on a day-to-day
basis, back there in their homes, or on the street, or over the
garden fence, then it's about social relationships."

The narrator says: "Two-thirds
of all our conversations, Robin Dunbar believes, are dedicated to
gossip. Throughout human evolution, could nature have selected not
just for the fittest, but for those with the most refined social
skills?" Dunbar continues: "What language does--the bottom
line, if you like--is it just allows us to hold big groups together.
It's like kind of opening a window of opportunity. Suddenly there's
all sorts of other things you can do with it. Because you can use
it to solicit information about third parties so you can now see
what happened when you weren't actually present at the time."
This gives us an advantage over monkeys and apes, because "if
they don't see it, they don't know about it, and they never will."

Steven Pinker, however,
thinks Dunbar's view is only part of the story: "Gossip is
certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because
it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor,
who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse."
But "there are all kinds of ways that language can be useful.
Gossip, I think, is just one of them."

So to be human, we are
told, is to have language--even if it is language without speech.
And language is useful in many ways--including holding together
big groups, gossiping, and communicating technical information.
But what do language and evolution have to do with each other?

Although languages certainly
change over time, they do not evolve in the sense of becoming more
complex. Languages cannot be ranked in order from primitive to more
advanced. According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language: "Anthropologically
speaking, the human race can be said to have evolved from primitive
to civilized states, but there is no sign of language having gone
through the same kind of evolution." Complex language simply
appeared, fully formed, with the first humans. There is no evidence
for Dawkins's claim that a Darwinian process "led to an improvement
in the ability to use language."

So language hasn't evolved
in complexity since it originated, and its origin remains mysterious.
We are told that language may have been the evolutionary turning-point
that gave rise to modern humans. But in Episode Two we were told
that "walking on two feet" may have been that turning-point,
and in Episode Five we were told that our ancestors' "choosing
their sexual partners for their brains" may have been that
turning-point. The truth is that all of these are mere speculation.
From an evolutionary perspective, the origin of language, the brain,
and the human species itself remain mysterious. The question asked
at the beginning of this episode--"What happened to make all
this possible?"--remains unanswered.

This doesn't deter Evolution,
however, from piling speculation on speculation: "Language,"
the narrator concludes, is "the force that made modern human
culture possible, and that today tells us who we are, how we belong,
where we're bound. Language, according to Richard Dawkins, is also
central to a new and powerful evolutionary force."

E. Memes

"As far as a human
lifetime is concerned," says Dawkins, "the only kind of
evolutionary change we're likely to see very much of is not genetic
evolution at all, it's cultural evolution. And if we put a Darwinian
spin on that, then we're going to be talking about the differential
survival of memes, as opposed to genes."

According to psychologist
Susan Blackmore, of the University of the West of England: "Memes
are ideas, habits, skills, gestures, stories, songs--anything which
we pass from person to person by imitation. We copy them. Now, just
as genes are copied inside all the cells of our body and passed
on in reproduction, memes are copied by our brains and our behavior
and they're passed from person to person. And I think what happens
is, just as the competition between genes shapes all of biological
evolution, so it's the competition between memes that shapes our
minds and our cultures. So it's absolutely essential to understanding
human nature that we take account of memes."

The narrator says that
Blackmore "believes memes have been the forces driving human
evolution, especially since the mind's big bang some fifty thousand
years ago. She sees ideas, prejudices, trends and breakthroughs
behaving much like genes--self-replicating and accumulating from
mind to mind, society to society, generation to generation. Memes
are the building-blocks of a new kind of evolution." Richard
Dawkins adds: "If units of culture replicate themselves in
something like the same way as DNA molecules replicate themselves,
then we have the possibility of a completely new kind of Darwinism."

"Changes in the
human lifestyle for the last fifty thousand years," says Steven
Pinker, "have had very little to do with any biological change
in our brains. The reason that we live differently today from the
way the cavemen lived is not because we have better brains but because
we've been accumulating all of the thousands of discoveries that
our ancestors have made, and we have the benefit of a huge history
of inventions that we communicate non-genetically, through language,
through documents, through customs."

"Memes can be more
than passing fads," the narrator tells us. "They can be
titanic. They can modify the world, revolutionize life, even suppress
the forces of biological evolution. Consider insulin, one such meme,
now some eighty years old." We meet Jared, a fourteen-year-old
diabetic, who says he would probably be dead without insulin. "Before
the 1920s," the narrator continues, as we look at old photographs
of sickly youngsters, "individuals like Jared would have died
as children--never to reach the age of reproduction, never to pass
on their genes. Now young diabetics are no longer condemned to death.
Insulin, an idea that became a medicine, is just one more meme that
helps modern humans elude the forces of evolution. It and so many
other scientific breakthroughs provide us with new ways to survive."

Jared and his friends
go on their way, and Pinker remarks: "A lot of the creations
of the brain can actually make up for physical deficiencies and
could actually change the course of evolution." To those who
might say that it is unwise to interfere with evolution in this
way, Pinker responds that for thousands of years humans have depended
for survival on their own inventions, and this is simply "the
way human evolution works." As we watch a collage of cultural
diversity, the narrator adds: "Our rebellion against evolution
has taken many forms. Call it culture, call it memes, call it memetic
evolution--whatever. It makes every one of us this planet's best
survivor--so far."

Blackmore concludes with:
"Nowadays I would say that memetic evolution is going faster
and faster, and it has almost entirely taken over from biological
evolution. Not entirely, in a sense the two are going along hand
in hand. For example, birth control--the memes of the pill and condoms
and all these things have effects on the genes. In fact, they change
quite dramatically, across the planet, which genes are getting passed
on and which aren't. The more educated you are, the less children
you have. That is memes fighting against genes. What's also going
on now at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that the
memes have suddenly made themselves a new home: the Internet."
Blackmore says that although we thought we created the Internet,
in fact we are its slaves. She regards this as an "inevitable"
consequence of memetic evolution. "The memes are getting better
and faster, and more and more, and creating as they go, better copying
apparatus for their own copying. I don't know where that leaves
us in the future."

So memes invented the
Internet. And birth control. And insulin therapy for diabetics.
And, it seems, everything else. What's left? Is there anything that
is not a meme? A concept that describes
everything describes nothing, and is too vague and too broad to
be useful, especially in science. For just that reason, many scientists
have criticized the meme concept. In Stephen Jay Gould's words,
it is a "meaningless metaphor."

Instead of providing
us with new insights, "meme" is apparently just a new
label for familiar things like invention, science, art, and history.
But inventors, scientists, artists, and historians did very well
for centuries before Darwin and Dawkins came along. It was people,
not memes, who discovered things like insulin, and invented things
like the Internet, and created things like the Sistine Chapel, and
shaped history by their actions. Blackmore's claim that memes "create"
things is nonsense.

Whatever else we might
say about memes, one thing is clear: They work
against biological evolution. This "is not genetic evolution
at all," says Dawkins. Memes are "our rebellion against
evolution," says Pinker. It's "memes fighting against
genes," says Blackmore. So if memes have any significance at
all, they show that Darwin's theory of the origin of species is
not as central as Evolution would like us to believe. Whether memetic
evolution is unscientific, as its critics claim, or contrary to
biological evolution, as its proponents claim, it is strangely out
of place in this series.

Two people run across
a plain and into the distance, as the narrator says: "For our
species, as for all others, biological evolution has been the primary
engine of change." The scene shifts to cave paintings. "But
since the birth of culture some fifty thousand years ago, forces
far more powerful have overtaken human evolution. The mind's big
bang saw the birth of a new kind of change--not of the body, but
of ideas. That means that for the future of humankind evolution
may be no more than what we make of it."

Notes

.
On "bones of contention," see Roger Lewin, Bones of
Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, Second
Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997). The
Gee quotation is from Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond
the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (New York: The Free
Press, 1999), 32. For more on the controversial nature of paleoanthropology,
see Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth? (Washington,
DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), Chapter 11.

.
The Stern quotation is from David L. Stern, "Perspective:
Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Problem of Variation,"
Evolution 54 (2000), 1079.

Pinker's glib
statements about mutations ignore the fact that biologists know
almost nothing about how genetic mutations might produce the sorts
of changes evolution requires. In 1988, evolutionary biologists
John Endler and Tracy McLellan wrote: "Although much is know
about mutation, it is still largely a `black box' relative to evolution."
John A. Endler and Tracey McLellan, "The Processes of Evolution:
Toward a Newer Synthesis," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
19 (1988), 397. Ten years later, evolutionary geneticist Allen Orr
wrote: "Our understanding of the genetics of adaptation remains
appallingly weak." H. Allen Orr, "The evolutionary genetics
of adaptation: a simulation study," Genetical Research (Cambridge)
74 (1999), 212.

A mutation
that changes the direction of shell coiling in some snails is not
known to be harmful, but it does not contribute anything to evolution.
See M. H. Sturtevant, "Inheritance of direction of coiling
in Limnaea," Science 58 (1932), 269-270.

.
The quotations from the Cambridge Encyclopedia are from David
Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Second Edition.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6, 290. For a recent
story on the controversy over linguistic evolution, see Bea Perks,
"Linguists and evolutionists need to talk about linguistic
evolution," The BioMedNet Magazine (August 15, 2001), available
at:

http://news.bmn.com/news/story?day=010816&story=2

.
Richard Dawkins invented the term "meme" in the last
chapter of The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976). Among other things, the idea of God is a meme. Dawkins
wrote: "The survival value of the god meme in the meme
pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides
a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions
about existence. . . God exists, if only in the form of a meme
with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment
provided by human culture." (207)

Stephen Jay
Gould called memes a "meaningless metaphor" on a radio
show November 11, 1996. See Susan Blackmore, "Memes, Minds
and Selves," at:

http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/art98/blac.htm#b

The Coyne
quotations are from Jerry A. Coyne, "The self-centred meme,"
a review of Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine, in Nature (April
29, 1999), 767-768.

http://www.salon.com/july97/21st/meme970710.html

.
The Missa Luba is a mass originally sung in pure Congolese style
by Les Troubadours du roi baudouin and directed by Father Guido
Haazen. See:

http://usrwww.mpx.com.au/~charles/Requiem/missa_luba.htm

The kyrie
eleison in this episode probably comes from a newer version sung
by the Mungano National Choir of Kenya and directed by Boniface
Mganga; it is available as a Philips CD from Polygram Classics,
New York, NY. About ten minutes earlier in the episode, just after
Richard Dawkins speaks and some primitive-looking people are standing
around a fire, the background music is the agnus Dei from the
same Missa Luba. Agnus Dei is Latin for "the Lamb of God"--Jesus
Christ.